


time to go

by dyintherain



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Breakups, Flashbacks, Light Angst, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29172246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dyintherain/pseuds/dyintherain
Summary: One last night of reminiscing, before everything changes.One last drink, before it’s time to go.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45
Collections: johndofest - round one





	time to go

**Author's Note:**

> prompt #10: no matter how many times they fall apart, they always seem to end up back together. maybe one day they'll stay that way.
> 
> kind of inspired by that one ted and robin scene in himym. if you know, you know. :’)

**present day**

It’s just like old times.

Jungwoo is throwing his head back in laughter, earning a sleepy grunt from Yuta, who’s resting his head on his shoulder. Beside them, Jaehyun’s entire face is growing more pink by the minute, giggling madly at something Taeil just said.

Eight years since their college graduation and it feels like nothing has changed at all.

Doyoung just sits back on his chair, looking around at his friends and feeling strangely sentimental. (Must be the late hour. Must be what’s waiting for him tomorrow.) 

From across the table, he meets Johnny’s eyes. Johnny gives him a soft smile, subtly tipping his half-empty glass in Doyoung’s direction. Doyoung’s heart skips a beat at the simple gesture. (Still, after all this time. He faintly wonders if there will ever come a time when it would stop doing that.)

“Alright,” Taeyong says suddenly from beside him, bracing both hands against the table as he stands up. “Time to call it a night.” He turns to Doyoung and places a hand on his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t stay up too late, okay? Big day tomorrow.”

Doyoung rolls his eyes even as his lips stretch into a smile. “Yessir.”

“You too,” Taeyong says, pointedly looking at everyone else at the table.

There’s a chorus of groans, mostly from Taeil, but they all down the last of their drinks anyway and start to stand up. Jungwoo shakes his shoulder and Yuta sits up from it, rubbing his eyes and looking around blearily.

Doyoung stands too and looks again at Johnny, who’s still casually sitting back in his chair, looking for all the world like he’s not going anywhere else anytime soon.

“One more for the road?” Johnny asks him softly when their eyes meet.

Doyoung brings his wrist to his face, looking down at his watch. It’s almost midnight now. A few minutes, and it’ll officially be his wedding day. 

They all probably should be getting some sleep right around two hours ago but, well—it’s Johnny. How can he say no?

  
  


They leave their table and move to the bar. Johnny orders them each a glass of some thirty-year old whiskey, and Doyoung laughs. “This is probably a bad idea.”

Johnny shrugs. “Remember the first time we broke up?”

Doyoung raises an eyebrow, wondering what that has to do with anything. “Why would you bring that up now?”

“Feels like the perfect time, don’t you think?” The bartender slides the glasses over to them, and Johnny takes his, raising it as if for a toast. “Night before the wedding and all that.”

“You really want to unpack our past? Tonight? Of all nights?”

“One last time to look back at everything, and then tomorrow we forget about all of it,” Johnny pronounces, raising his glass even higher and nudging the other one towards Doyoung. Doyoung takes his own glass and clinks it against Johnny’s, laughing a little.

“Alright then, but if I wake up with puffy eyes tomorrow you’re gonna have to answer to Taeyong.”

“Please,” Johnny grins, waving a hand. “Deal.”

  
  


**twelve years ago**

The first time Johnny saw Doyoung was through the lens of his camera.

It was a cloudy day, and he was in an unfamiliar school, an unfamiliar town. Jaehyun convinced him to go with the rest of the staff a little early, and said it would be good for him to get around the place in advance, to discover its nooks and crannies, so that he’d already know where to go when the contest starts. But Johnny chose to get a few extra hours of sleep instead and drove on his own, arriving just in time for the briefing of the photojournalism participants to start.

Johnny never thought he’d be one to join the school paper, much less one to participate in a week-long conference that revolves around high school journalism. But he was from a small school, and Jaehyun was the editor, and he was the only one who owned a film camera then. Somehow, all these three things together have led him there—aimlessly walking and looking around, faintly recognizing that he was a little lost, shooting random stuff and wondering how he would tie all his shots together to fit the contest’s theme.

That’s when he stumbled into him.

Kim Doyoung.

But of course at the time he didn’t know his name yet. Didn’t know anything apart from the fact that he never believed that you could lose your breath for a moment just from looking at someone, until he turned with his camera and caught Doyoung in the frame.

“You look a little lost.” Those were the first words Doyoung ever said to him.

”Help me find my way?” Johnny had said in reply.

It was supposed to be a pickup line, but Doyoung smiled and inclined his head. “Where did you want to go?”

  
  


**present day**

“But that’s just the first time we met,” Doyoung says, a furrow on his brows.

“I don’t know, I just feel like our first breakup traces back to that first moment, though...”

Doyoung laughs. “Yeah, while we’re at it maybe we could consider how Cain killing Abel led to you breaking my heart.”

Johnny gasps, clutching his chest dramatically. “ _Me_ breaking _your_ heart?”

Doyoung lightly hits his shoulder with the back of his hand. “You know you did.”

“Only because you did first!” Johnny protests. Doyoung is about to retort but the barb gets caught in his lips when Johnny’s face turns serious. “I don’t know, this is going to sound so corny but, I feel like from the very first time I saw you, I already knew I’d get hurt loving you.”

“Johnny.”

“I’m just saying,” Johnny raises both arms over his head. “Seeing you through my lens first, with your face turned away from me? Felt like foreshadowing.”

They go quiet for a moment. 

Doyoung stares at his glass, turning it round and round between his fingers. “You’re right,” he says after a while then looks up at Johnny with a smirk, “that _did_ sound so corny.”

Johnny lets out a quiet laugh and orders another glass.

  
  


**eleven years ago**

“—and then Jaehyun said, ‘but what about us?’ with this dead serious face,” Johnny paused for effect, but the other line stayed quiet. “...and everyone just lost it. I swear he can be funny sometimes,” he finished his story, laughing and shaking his head. From across the room, Jaehyun raised his middle finger at him without looking up from his laptop.

“ _Hmmm_ ,” came Doyoung’s response from the other end of the line. 

Johnny stopped laughing. 

Something was off.

Something had been off for weeks now, but when you live three hours away from each other, lots of things could feel off—at least, that’s what Johnny told himself. (It would be the weekend soon, the first one in a while that they were both free and not burdened with all the stuff that comes with both of their looming high school graduations.) Only three days left, and they’d see each other face to face again, and everything would be right in the world. But for now—

“Everything okay?”

“ _Yeah, I’m just- I’m just tired, I guess,_ ” Doyoung said.

“Well, alright. I guess I’ll... go. So you could rest.”

Johnny didn’t mean it.

If he was being honest, he’d have liked Doyoung to tell him no, that he was tired but not too tired to talk to him. Just like what he would have done, if the situation was reversed.

But instead all Doyoung replied was, “ _Yeah_.”

Johnny gulped and tried not to read too much into that. “Okay, I love you.”

It was so quiet for a long moment that Johnny had to look at his phone to make sure the line didn’t get disconnected. “Doyoung... you still there?”

“ _Yeah_.”

“Oh, uh. Did you hear me?” He had to wince as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Doyoung said again.

It was four in the afternoon, Johnny’s journalism period. There wasn’t much left to do for their last issue—their adviser left them alone to supervise the yearbook staff, and Jaehyun gave him a free pass to call his boyfriend instead.

It was four in the afternoon, in a small corner in the school paper’s office—the exact time and place that Johnny experienced his first heartbreak.

“Okay, uhm. Bye. I love you,” he tried again. Because that was always how they ended their calls. But Doyoung had gone off-script and Johnny didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

Maybe it would have hurt less, if Doyoung had just hung up. At least then Johnny could have just chucked off his phone and processed everything without Doyoung on the other line hearing his every breath.

“ _Bye_ ,” Doyoung said instead in a hushed tone, but he still didn’t end the call.

“What’s going on, Doyoung?” Johnny asked tentatively. There’s a heavy sigh from the other end, then a deep inhale. “ _Let’s just talk about it on Saturday._ ”

And that was that.

  
  


**present day**

“I admit that was pretty cold,” Doyoung confesses before Johnny can say anything.

But Johnny just quietly continues to sip his drink. When he puts his glass down, he sighs deeply and stretches his arms over his head. “Do you sometimes wonder what could have happened? Like, what if we didn’t break up then? I bet we’d have adopted two kids by now.”

Doyoung scoffs. “Yeah... probably,” he says simply, because he never liked this game. _What if_ s and _what could have been_ s—what use are they anyway?

“Or what if,” Johnny starts to say. “What if that was that? And we went to different universities and never crossed paths again?”

“Wow, that’s—“ Doyoung bites his lip and sighs deeply. “I can’t even imagine.”

“You’d just be ‘that one guy I dated briefly in high school’, and when you’d come up in conversations, I’d just be like, ‘what was his name again? Do- doyo...?” Johnny puts a hand on his chin, narrowing his eyes and looking up at the ceiling in mock thought.

“Please, as if you could ever forget me,” Doyoung scoffs at him. “Nah, I would have been the love of your life when you were young.”

Johnny smiles at that. He reaches out across the bar counter to take Doyoung’s hand.

“You still are.”

  
  


**four years ago**

They managed to last six years, the second time. 

Three years of late night cramming sessions at each other’s dorm rooms, 2AM cheap vending machine coffee runs to the nearest 7-eleven, and squeezing in quick dates in between mismatched class schedules. Three years, with Johnny leaning against Doyoung’s chest in the middle of particularly challenging problem sets, with Doyoung lying his head on Johnny’s lap, under the huge acacia tree in the campus quad on the rare days when they didn’t have requirements to catch up on. Three years, in which they talked about finding each other again, in which they both promised they’re in it for the long haul this time, in which Johnny brought Doyoung home to Chicago and his mom talked Doyoung’s ear off with random anecdotes from Johnny’s childhood, and in which Doyoung took Johnny to dinner with his parents and held his hand the whole time as he finally came out.

Then another three years, a montage of memories: driving around town a few months before graduation, trying to find the best apartment that they could afford, slowly filling up the place with different pieces of furniture from thrift bazaars and estate sales, making each other coffee and breakfast on mornings of job interviews, staying up late to wait on nights when one of them is working overtime. Movie marathons, slightly fancy dinner dates, impromptu Sunday brunches, holidays at each other’s hometowns.

Six years, all and all, that ended in what felt like just a span of one breath.

  
  


It has been a year now, since Johnny moved out of their small studio and into his new, company-subsidized two-bedroom loft in the big city. Doyoung would have loved it.

Johnny would have probably loved it more, too, if Doyoung came with him.

One year ago, Johnny packed his bags and threw away the life he had with Doyoung, the one he never thought he’d have to give up on.

He was offered a promotion, one that could really fast-track his career, one that he’d been planning for since he was a sophomore in college, when he first decided he wanted to pursue a life in the cutthroat field of corporate finance. But it required him to move to the head office, and at the time, when Johnny was sitting across from his boss and faced with his best news of the year, he never imagined there could be any other right answer but yes.

“No.”

Doyoung dropped his hand, and the smile dropped from Johnny’s face. They were both standing in the doorway of their apartment, and Johnny hadn’t even gotten to take his shoes off yet. Doyoung walked back inside and settled on the couch, lips pursed and eyes staring straight ahead.

“What do you mean?” Johnny asked as he followed him.

“I’m happy for you, I really am,” Doyoung sighed out, turning on the couch to face Johnny. “But... this is a big move.”

Johnny sighed. “I know, but... it’s a really great offer, Doyoung. They even found me an apartment already. Look,” he took his phone out of his pocket to show the pictures HR sent him earlier, but Doyoung was already leaning away.

“ _Found_ you an apartment already? They seem so sure you’re gonna say yes.”

Johnny’s fingers froze halfway through scrolling on his gallery. He looked up at Doyoung, whose eyes were already widening with sudden realization.

“You already did. You said yes.” It wasn’t a question, but Johnny nodded anyway, biting his lip.

Doyoung let out a breath, something that sounded halfway between a pained sob and an incredulous laugh. “What, so...” Doyoung trailed off, leaning back heavily on the sofa. “You just said yes, without telling me.” He said it in a flat tone, a sharp contrast to the heavy weight settling on Johnny’s chest as he realized what he’d just done.

He said yes without thinking, too caught up in the moment and still unbelieving that he was getting the offer. He said yes, afraid that if he didn’t, right at that second, everything would slip through his fingers.

Well, everything was slipping through his fingers now.

Doyoung turned to stare at him, eyes starting to water and mouth still caught open in shock. Johnny moved to reach out for him but Doyoung was already standing, heading for the bedroom.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have, but I... I don’t know, my mind had blanked and I couldn’t think of anything else that— what are you doing?” Johnny stopped mid-way through his panicked rambling when he caught up to Doyoung and saw him hastily stuffing some clothes and a few things in his backpack.

Doyoung zipped it shut, the sound of it harshly ringing out across the room as Johnny could do nothing but stare at where the zipper ended, the sight of it making him lose his breath as he scrambled to think of something, anything, that could rewind and reset the last few minutes.

“I’m going over at Taeyong’s. I just… I don’t want to… I can’t bear to be here tonight.” _With you_. He didn’t say it but Johnny could almost hear it clearly at the look on his face. 

Doyoung was slipping out before Johnny could think to block his way. He caught up with him right at the doorway. It had only been a few minutes, but already it felt like hours had passed since Johnny was turning his key and calling out to Doyoung, with a huge grin on his face and what he thought was the greatest news ready to jump out of his chest.

“Doyoung please, I swear I didn’t mean to. I was just so caught up in the whole thing, and my boss was looking at me expectantly and I thought you’d be happy—“

“I told you I am,” Doyoung cut him off. He turned around sharply to face Johnny, tears already running down both cheeks. “And I believe you, I do. But you know what’s running through my head right now?”

Johnny shook his head as he felt tears start to fall from his eyes too. 

“Earlier, I was in a meeting with a client who owns a yacht-wrapping shop. And you know what my first thought was? I thought, _god_ , Johnny would love this shit. I was already hearing your stupid jokes in my head not even five minutes into our conversation.” Doyoung was shaking his head, furiously wiping tears away from his face. “I had lunch with my team and I thought, _I can’t wait to take Johnny to this restaurant,_ if only because they had the best free appetizers. I can’t pass by a bookstore without thinking of that time you took me to one for our second date and you said you got the idea from tumblr. I... everywhere I go, everything fucking reminds me of you, Johnny. So maybe... maybe I don’t know what to think right now, hearing you explain that you just made this huge decision that could upend our lives as we know it, without even considering what I’d feel, all because you couldn’t think of anything else in the moment. Not even me.”

Doyoung let out a shaky exhale at the end of it. Johnny stood frozen, Doyoung’s words replaying over and over in his head. Finally, Doyoung sighed, turned, and walked away. He didn’t even slam the door on his way out, still managed to close it gently, probably thinking of the deposit they could lose if it fell off its hinges.

Johnny slid down to the floor as the lock clicked, knowing that he truly fucked up this time.

  
  


The city was everything he thought it would be—bright, busy, noisy.

It was everything that Doyoung hated, and Johnny knew that—had always known that. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a huge surprise to him, then, that him saying yes to the promotion meant eventually losing Doyoung.

He couldn’t decide if it would have been better, if the job wasn’t all that he expected it to be. At least then, he could have just come back home, knowing that he tried and chose poorly and it didn’t work out. But it did. And Johnny didn’t have a home to come back to with Doyoung anymore.

And so he stayed.

Maybe it’s all for the better, he decided then. He still fucking loved Doyoung, but they’ve already fallen apart a lot of times. Maybe that was all the chances they had, and they both managed to fuck up each one. It was a good six years at least. 

But maybe now it truly was time to move on—

—or so he told himself until he saw Doyoung. Right in the middle of the busy street, in a city he once swore he hated and would never step foot into. Johnny had to wonder if he was dreaming.

“Doyoung?”

Doyoung looked up at him with a startled expression, one hand on his chest. He looked pretty much the same, but Johnny could tell that he changed the frame of his glasses and grew out his hair longer this time.

“Johnny? Hey!” he said casually, offering him a small smile. One year ago and he couldn’t even look Johnny in the eye. Johnny tried to return the gesture, but the smile came out shaky on his lips, with his heart feeling like it was waging war against his rib cage.

“Wh-what are you doing here?” Johnny stuttered out. Doyoung pulled him to the side, under a bookstore’s awning as the crowd jostled and glared at them for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk.

Johnny glanced at the sign on the door and the bestsellers’ display on the window. ‘ _I can’t pass by a bookstore without thinking of that time you took me to one for our second date_ ,’ Doyoung said to him then, and Johnny briefly wondered if he still even remembered it now. But Doyoung seemed like he hadn’t even noticed, dropping Johnny’s arm when they were safely out of the crowd’s way.

Doyoung cleared his throat. “I—uh, I actually live here now. We moved just over a month ago.”

Johnny felt his mouth drop open, eyes blinking as the rest of him stood frozen, just like a year ago when Doyoung walked out of the apartment. Doyoung didn’t come home for a week, and every night after work Johnny would come straight to Taeyong’s just to plead for Doyoung to come back.

“ _I’ll reject the offer. Tomorrow, I’ll talk to my boss,”_ he promised through the door, where he knew Doyoung was listening. It suddenly creaked open, and Johnny almost fell from leaning his weight against it.

Doyoung looked even more disappointed at him than the night he broke the news. “ _God_ , _stop saying things you don’t fucking mean, Johnny. Don’t insult me._ ”

When the door closed on his face again, Johnny knew he’d just lost his last chance.

“We?” he parroted absent-mindedly, finally coming back to his senses and latching on to that single word. _We moved just over a month ago._

Doyoung bit his lip and nodded, eyes trained on the ground. “Yeah, Taeyong and I.”

Johnny inhaled sharply.

“He uhm, he got a research grant,” Doyoung continued to explain. “And he had to move.”

“So... you went with him?” Johnny asked, even though the answer was pretty obvious, the evidence literally standing in front of him. He bit his tongue, his unsaid thoughts leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. _So you went with him. But you wouldn’t go with me._

Doyoung sighed, and the reality of the situation suddenly seemed to finally dawn on the both of them. Their eyes met, and in that second Johnny felt like the whole six years of their relationship just flashed through his eyes, just like how they say your life memories play in your head before you die.

“I guess you could say that,” Doyoung said a little too softly, that Johnny had to strain to hear amidst the traffic noise around them. “I mean, I’d just left my job at the time, and I figured... why not look for opportunities here in the city, you know?”

Johnny didn’t know.

“But you hated the city,” was all he could say. _It’s why you didn’t want to come with me._

Doyoung just shrugged. “I did. But I guess, well, people change.”

Johnny nodded, like he understood. People change. _Doyoung_ changes. He’d seen him change his favorite book about a dozen times in the span of six years. He’d seen him change his opinion and preferences about a lot of things, and Johnny took everything in stride, because he knew it’s just a fact of life. _People change._

But somehow he couldn’t wrap his head around this specific one. He stared intently at Doyoung. He wasn’t quite smiling anymore, but Johnny knew how to read his eyes all too well.

“Are you happy?” he asked him.

Doyoung pressed his lips together and nodded, just once. “Yeah.”

  
  


**present day**

“Wow, _that_ is a very biased retelling,” Doyoung jokes as Johnny finishes recounting the whole thing, trying to keep his voice from breaking at the memories it resurfaced.

“What?” Johnny raises his eyebrow. “I didn’t emphasize enough that I fucked up?”

Despite everything, this makes Doyoung laugh. “No, you made it seem like you were the only one hurt at what happened.”

Johnny frowns. “Did I? I never meant to.” 

Doyoung shrugs.

“And hey,” Johnny continues, “I had to move to a completely new and unfamiliar city with a broken heart!”

Doyoung lets out an incredulous laugh. “You mean, you got promoted with a hefty raise and had to move to a spacious loft while I was left behind in our old cramped apartment, _also_ with a broken heart?”

Johnny doesn’t answer that, takes his glass instead and downs the remaining liquid in it in one drink. He slams it back down at the counter, then looks up at Doyoung. “It’s getting so warm in here.”

“ _No,_ you’re just getting drunk.”

Johnny rolled his eyes, moving his head side to side to work out a crick in his neck. “Wanna head down to the beach?”

Doyoung’s eyes widen. “Now?” He looks down at his watch again, sees that it’s already 3:30. “I’m _really_ going to fall asleep in the middle of the ceremony at this rate.”

But then he looks back up, at Johnny, who’s smiling at him, cheeks pink but eyes still clear. “And then Taeyong’s gonna kill you,” he jokes. 

Doyoung glares at him. “He really will.” But he stands and sighs anyway, heading for the inn’s side exit, as he feels Johnny’s steps closely following behind.

  
  


**four and a half years ago**

The apartment was completely bare when Doyoung and Johnny first moved in just after graduation, part of why they got it at such a good deal. 

On their first night, they ordered pizza and laid on their backs on the bare floor because they didn’t have a couch yet and the kitchen counter was still covered by the hideous contact paper that Doyoung couldn’t stand.

The only thing they had then, aside from their clothes and the few knick knacks that were still in boxes in the bedroom, was Johnny’s precious art piece. It was the first thing that Doyoung unpacked, the first thing he hung up on the wall—an abstract charcoal drawing with lots of swirling lines that Johnny swore was Doyoung, which he created in the only art elective he took in college.

Johnny made it the first day they got back together, carried it through different dorm rooms throughout the years, including that one semester when he lived together with Jungwoo and Yuta, and then here, in the first apartment that was fully theirs. (Well, theirs to _rent_ , but still.)

Now the apartment looked like a reverse picture of that first night—fully furnished, but no Johnny and no art piece on the wall. The place where it hung for three years was a glaring sight, a patch of rectangle brighter than the rest of the wall surrounding it, just another Johnny-shaped emptiness.

Doyoung had been staring at it for hours now—for almost a year, if he was being honest, ever since Johnny took and packed it in his suitcase, just one of the many things he took with him when he left.

Some days, Doyoung could almost forget what he was so angry for. He always picked up his phone on those days, thumb hovering over Johnny’s contact that he never had the guts to delete, even after all this time, knowing it would be futile as he knew the number by heart anyway.

This was one of those days. He almost pressed dial then, but then his phone was suddenly vibrating on his hands, Taeyong’s contact photo filling up the screen.

“ _I got a grant,_ ” Taeyong had said to him without hello. He was moving to the city, and Doyoung was still staring at the empty space on the wall. He didn’t even have to think for more than one minute, before he was telling his best friend that he wanted to come along.

  
  


**present day**

“Can I tell you something?” Johnny says, as they step into the sand.

It feels a little cold beneath Doyoung’s bare feet, but overall it’s not as cold as he expected—there’s a faint breeze blowing, ruffling his hair and seeping through his jacket, but his body still feels a little warm from the whiskey, so the sensation is a welcome one.

He looks at Johnny, only half his face illuminated by the moonlight. The beach is naturally deserted, and it’s too quiet that Doyoung can hear their soft footfalls in the sand and the synced rhythm of their breathing.

“Yeah?” Doyoung says, wrapping his arms around himself.

“I was going to propose to you then.”

Doyoung stops walking. Johnny does too, after a beat.

“What?”

“Come on, is it really that surprising? We’ve been dating for six years then,” Johnny says, then continues walking. Doyoung catches up with him.

“I bought a ring before I got the news about my promotion,” Johnny continues, putting his hands in his jean pockets. “I was planning to do it that weekend. And then while I was on my way home from the talk with my boss, I just… I suddenly thought it would be better to do it when we’re settled in the city. New apartment, new chapter of our lives. That sort of thing.” He glances at Doyoung briefly. “I stupidly thought that you’d really come with me. I’m sorry, that was really selfish.”

Doyoung stays quiet, staring ahead at the path in front of them.

“The ring was waiting at the kitchen counter of my new apartment. I don’t know, I guess,” Johnny pauses with a sigh. “I guess I was still hoping you’d show up when I left you the key. And then I’d just get down on my knee, right then and there, once you walk in.”

Johnny has long since moved out from that apartment, but Doyoung still has the key, tucked deep in the top drawer of his nightstand back home.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

Johnny has the gall to grin at him, all while Doyoung feels like he’s on the verge of tearing up. “I told you, one last time to look back on everything. What do you think would have happened?”

Doyoung rolls his eyes, partly at Johnny, partly to keep his tears from falling. “Does it even matter? Past is past and we’re here now.”

Johnny nods slowly beside him. “Yeah… I guess. Are you happy?” he inclines his head to gaze at Doyoung.

Doyoung lets out a laugh and taps Johnny’s cheeks lightly. “What kind of question is that? Of course I am.”

“Good. I am too,” Johnny says, putting a hand on top of Doyoung’s before he can move it away from his cheek. Doyoung scrunches his nose. “You better be.”

  
  


The sky is slowly breaking open by the time they got tired of aimlessly walking around the beach and sat down in the sand.

“Remember when you broke up with me for like a week in junior year just because I took you to see _The Strangers_?” Johnny says as he turns to Doyoung suddenly.

“Oh my god, I thought we were done,” Doyoung groans, but laughs anyway at the memory.

  
  


_"It’s just that we’ve tried so many times and I’m tired. Maybe we’re just not it, you know? I thought maybe we were just young then. But now I’m thinking it’s not the circumstance. It’s not our youth. It’s us,”_ Doyoung remembers saying then, as soon as they got out of the theater.

" _Doyoung, I- it’s just a fucking movie,_ ” Johnny had said in response, running a hand down his face in exasperation.

Doyoung thought _The Strangers_ was a romantic comedy, until ten minutes into the movie and he realized it was actually a horror adventure, one that never in his life he would have wanted to see.

" _Maybe it’s not? Maybe you just don’t know me,_ ” he said to Johnny before walking out, crying all the way home.

“You know I hate horror movies,” Doyoung says now with a pout as Johnny laughs at him. It fades out into a sigh, until Johnny shakes his head, hands absent-mindedly playing with the sand beneath them.

“We broke up so many times for the smallest of reasons and most of the time it was your fault.”

Doyoung scoffs, looking at him incredulously. “ _My_ fault?”

“Yeah,” Johnny says, but there’s no teasing in his tone. “And then I still manage to cause the biggest fuck up that drove us apart.”

Doyoung softens at that, taking Johnny’s hand. “Remember when you said tomorrow we forget all of it?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that tomorrow is technically today now. Come on, we should at least get a little sleep.” He starts to stand, but Johnny doesn’t move and looks up at the sky instead.

“Wanna wait for the sunrise?”

Doyoung follows his gaze and sighs—a content sigh this time. “Yeah, might as well,” he says, sitting back down. “But after that it’s _really_ time to go.”

Johnny smiles at him. “Of course.”

  
  


Taeyong is sitting in the inn’s lobby, fiddling with his iPad when the two of them stumble back inside, giggling—a little from the alcohol still on their veins, a little from the sheer lack of sleep. Taeyong looks up at them, eyes widening. “Where have you guys been?”

Doyoung brings a hand to his mouth as he yawns. “This one wanted a last night of reminiscing or something,” he says in between, pointing a finger at Johnny.

Taeyong raises an eyebrow at them. “Oh my god, have you two been up all this time?” Doyoung nods. Taeyong rolls his eyes, “You’ve got the rest of your lives for that deep talks late into the night shit! _God_ , you two are such saps.”

Johnny laughs. “What are you doing up so early anyway?”

Taeyong holds up his iPad in response. “I have a lot of things to still go through today.” He steps closer to them and narrows his eyes. “Go to sleep now, please. Or you’re gonna look like pandas in your wedding photos.”

“Pandas are cute,” Doyoung mutters.

“ _Actual_ pandas are cute. Now come on, this is my first wedding planning gig and I’ll be damned if this doesn’t go smoothly. And that includes making sure you look great in the pictures. They’re going on my portfolio.”

Doyoung pouts at him. “And also because this is your best friend’s wedding and you want everything to be perfect for me.”

Taeyong waves a hand. “Yeah, that too. _Go_ ,” he says pointedly. Doyoung and Johnny giggle as they climb up the stairs to their room.

Johnny takes his hand as they reach the landing.

In a few hours, everything changes. But for now, it’s time to catch a little sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> to the prompter—thank you for the prompt and i really hope you enjoyed this one!
> 
> <3 to pao, for picking this prompt for me, and to karla, for all the encouragement along the way hhh it’s finally done!!
> 
> thank you to the johndo fest mods, too, for being so understanding and nice even though this is suuper late! and also to hourly johndo on twt for the inspirational material :D


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